4/15/2010 @ 6:50PM

Rundown: The 20 Most Profitable Small Businesses

The 20 Most Profitable Small Businesses

With the help of Sageworks, a Raleigh, N.C.-based accounting consultancy and private-company data provider, Forbes assembled a list of the 20 most profitable businesses–on a pretax basis–that aspiring entrepreneurs might launch. The data are drawn from financial statements on nearly 300,000 companies, most with under $10 million in annual revenue, bucketed by five- and six-digit North American Industry Classification System codes. The data were gathered between 2000 and 2009, to capture an entire business cycle; each category included at least 100 companies. Some businesses gravely hurt by the latest downturn, like architectural services, were dropped to avoid skewing the results. One takeaway: Specialization pays off.